Nano-satellites help monitor global fishing vessels

Publicly broadcast Automatic Identification System (AIS) messages received by satellites and ground-based receivers comprise the largest source of data used by Global Fishing Watch to track the planet’s fishing vessels, but gaps in AIS signals can occur in areas where satellite coverage is sparse or between satellite passes. To improve its coverage of fishing vessels Global Fishing Watch has announced a partnership with Spire Global, Inc, who manages a constellation of nano-satellites in low Earth orbit. Spire’s tiny satellites are launched at a rate of nearly four satellites per month. Global Fishing Watch estimates that Spire satellites will double the amount of data used to identify and track 60,000 commercial fishing vessels on the world’s oceans.

Latest research supports the work many years ago of Robert Howarth at Cornell who argued that leakages and other abnormal emissions of methane during fracking and other oil and gas operations erased the carbon advantage of natural gas over coal.

Environmental Indexes

From Our Files

During the last deglaciation there was several episodes of rapid and substantial sea level rise. A recent study has found that during one of these, sea level rose by about 17 meters over a period that does not exceed 350 years, but could be as low as a century.

Between 2005 and 2017 the U.S. economy as measured by real GDP expanded by about 20 %. Over this same period, emissions from power generation dropped which is evidence of a decoupling between economic growth and power generation.

As the Earth warms, permafrost soils melt and this old carbon is released into the atmosphere as methane and CO2. Using radiocarbon dating of methane bubbles and soil organic carbon from lakes formed by melting thermafrost in Alaska, Canada, Sweden and Siberia combined with remote sensing it is found that methane and carbon dioxide releaed in the Arctic region during the past 60 years is much less than the CO2 contributed annually from anthropogenic and other sources.

New evidence from analyzing fossil plankton shells has revealed that CO2 concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere was about triple current levels around 52 million years ago. It then declined to levels close to current atmospheric CO2 concentration 34 million years ago when Antarctica began to glaciate.